Seeing relationships through the lens of psychological contracts: the structure of consumer service relationships

Abstract

Serving as mental models, psychological contracts guide consumers' service interactions with their service providers. This study incorporates a psychological contract perspective into the relationship marketing literature, exploring service customers' beliefs about the terms and conditions of the resource exchange process and the types of relationships they form with service providers. It provides new insights that explain why and how some customers respond favorably to a company's relationship overtures and investments while others do not. A latent class analysis on a sample of 700 consumers across three different service industries reveals that consumers form four distinct types of psychological contracts: relational, standard, transitional, and captive. To further validate the differences between the contract types, open-ended responses from the respondents were sorted by each class. The distinctive themes that emerged provide a richer understanding of the characteristics of each class beyond those inferred from the quantitative results. Each contract type is also profiled against its underlying level of trust, satisfaction, and commitment to understand the relationship between the contract types and these traditional relationship marketing variables. Marketers can differentiate their relationship marketing strategies and allocate their resource investments more effectively by segmenting consumers according to their psychological contract type.

How Does Serious M‐Game Technology Encourage Low‐Income Households To Perform Socially Responsible Behaviors?

“…Serious m‐games can be used to motivate and persuade households to perform socially responsible behaviors such as energy efficiency through establishing or reinforcing mutual beliefs or informal obligations regarding energy efficiency. This finding is consistent with the concept of psychological contracts, which can be formed upon a socioemotional base, whereby social and emotional experiences can support interpersonal relationships and agreements (Guo et al., ). In the case of this study, participants found experiences of using a serious m‐game enabled the construction or enforcement of psychological contracts for household energy‐efficient behaviors, which in turn lead to higher levels of motivation and persuasion to perform behaviors.…”

“…Interestingly, participants discussed the household values of saving energy could be verbally or nonverbally agreed among household members. These agreements appear to closely resemble psychological contracts, whereby household members share mutual beliefs, perceptions, and informal obligations as to how household energy‐efficient behaviors should be performed (Guo, Gruen, & Tang, ). The majority of participants pointed out that after playing the serious m‐game, they became more cognitively aware (Gentile et al., ) of their obligations in attempting to save energy in their household and this would lead to higher levels of motivation and persuasion to perform energy‐efficient behaviors (Klimmt, ).…”

Making the Customer-Brand Relationship Sustainable: The Different Effects of Psychological Contract Breach Types on Customer Citizenship Behaviours

“…The classical psychological contract literature describes two types of consumer psychological contract: the transactional psychological contract and the relational psychological contract [17]. A recent paper suggested that there are four types of contracts: relational, standard, transitional and captive contracts [5]; however, in their definitions, the features of the standard contract are similar to those of the transactional contract. Therefore, we address the two classical contract types in this paper.…”

“…Citizenship behaviour is not a requirement for a successful product or service delivery, but it has positive effects on brand image and brand relationships [3]. Recent research on the interactive process of the consumer-brand relationship has typically explored it from two perspectives to acquire an in-depth understanding of this phenomenon [3][4][5].…”

Dimension, Content, and Role of Platform Psychological Contract: Based on Online Ride-Hailing Users

“…Currently, empirical research on consumer psychological contracts in the platform economy is focused on the relationship between consumers and online businesses (Pavlou and Gefen, 2005;Guo et al, 2015;Malhotra et al, 2017). Although there is some evidence on consumer perception of the responsibility of online platforms, empirical research on the consumer's psychological contract with platform enterprises is limited.…”